karunkarthik:
hey
i used expresso 3.0 beta for testing .. the regex did not work there ..
in the regex analyser pane this is what i got : Possibly unrecognised Unicode Character class :[L] .
i know it might be asking for a bit too much .. i'm relatively new to Regular Expressions .. so it would be great if u could give a small description of the regex u give ..
(for eg . where is the check for not more than two repeating characters happening ?? )
thanks a ton ..
My bad I forgot about the repeating character requirement, but before we get to that let just clear something up. I don't know what you are but there is nothing wrong with the syntax of the previous regex I gave you and it works prefectly fine in Expresso 2.1 and 3.0 I've tested with both got no error message either time.
Now this regex
^(?!.*(.)\1{2})(((?=.*?\p{L})(?=.*?\d))|((?=.*?\p{L})(?=.*?[!@#$%^&*()+=._-]))|((?=.*?[!@#$%^&*()+=._-])(?=.*?\d)))([-!@#$%^&*()+=.\w]){8,}$
meets all of your requirement and it ran in Expresso. There was another problem with the results but that's not important
karunkarthik:
And also .. i dunno wht regex engine is involved in my case ..
i
am using this to validate a password using the validation feature in
STRUTS .. a file validation.xml is where i am goin to give the regex ..
the validation occurs in validator-rules.xml .. (all built in files in
Struts Validator Framework )
i think the parser used here is SAX parser ..
please do correct me if there is something wrong in the above .
Secondly if you are using Struts you are going to be using a java regex engine, I think it's Jakarta ORO but I don't remember. It could be the other Jakarta regex project (REGEXP) or another regex engine altogether. But I think it's ORO. The reason we ask in the posting guidelines what you are programming in is because all regex engines are not created equal. The more advanced features aren't always supported and occasionally there are syntax differences.
Neither of the Jakarta projects support the Unicode syntax so even if you figured out what you did wrong in Expresso and got it working there it would not work for Struts. If you followed the link to the blog entry you should now understand why you should not be testing regexes in Expresso that you are planing to use in Struts (unless it's very very simple)
Now if I relax your original criteria some and reduce alphas just the english alphabet, which might have been all you really wanted but you didn't say that, this regex
^(?!.*(.)\1{2})(((?=.*?[a-zA-Z])(?=.*?\d))|((?=.*?[a-zA-Z])(?=.*?[!@#$%^&*()+=._-]))|((?=.*?[!@#$%^&*()+=._-])(?=.*?\d)))([-!@#$%^&*()+=._\da-zA-Z]){8,}$
works with Jakarta ORO, which is probably what you need to test any regex you are going to use with Struts, unless you find Struts is using some other regex engine. Now if you really meant alphas that would require a different regex.
Finally here is the first regex in this post with comments
^(?!.*(.)\1{2}) #No more than 2 repeating characters
(((?=.*?\p{L})(?=.*?\d)) #Letters and numbers
|((?=.*?\p{L})(?=.*?[!@#$%^&*()+=._-])) #Letters and Special characters
|((?=.*?[!@#$%^&*()+=._-])(?=.*?\d)) #Special Characters and digits
)([-!@#$%^&*()+=.\w]){8,}$ #8 or more of the allowed characters
Michael
"In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not."
Albert Einstein